You arrive at the showground at 6:45 a.m. It’s already 82 degrees. Your horse is looky and tight off the trailer. There are dogs barking, a PA system crackling, four trailers wedged into a space designed for two, and someone’s horse just teleported sideways past you at the walk. Your dressage test is in forty minutes and you haven’t eaten anything except half a granola bar.
This is summer eventing. And your nervous system — your actual physiological nervous system — is already firing.
The problem isn’t that you’re nervous. Nerves are information. The problem is that most riders try to think their way out of a nervous system response, which is a little like trying to talk yourself out of a fever. It doesn’t work that way. You need tools that operate at the level of the body, not just the mind.
Here’s what actually helps.
Understand What’s Happening in Your Body First
When you feel that flutter in your chest, tight throat, or the urge to talk too fast and too much — that’s your sympathetic nervous system doing its job. It smells threat. Heat, noise, compressed timelines, an amped-up horse: these are real inputs. Your body is not being dramatic.
The issue at a summer show is that the environment layers stressors. Heat alone raises physiological arousal. Add a spooky horse, a tight schedule, and social pressure, and your window of tolerance narrows fast. By the time you’re in the warm-up ring, you may already be operating in a state where fine motor skills are degraded, your timing is off, and your breathing has gone shallow without you noticing.
Most riders at this point start gripping. The reins get shorter, the seat gets braced, and the horse — who is also hot and alert — escalates. It’s a feedback loop, and it happens in minutes.
Interrupting the loop is the whole game.
Get Your Breathing First, Not Your Horse
I know you want to longe, tack up, and get moving. But before you do anything with your horse, give yourself three to five minutes to regulate before you’re even in physical contact with them.
Stand away from the trailer — not in the bustle, but close enough to hear it. Take a breath in for four counts, out for six. The exhale longer than the inhale is not a wellness cliché; it directly activates the vagus nerve and begins to shift you toward parasympathetic dominance. Do this five times. Not one and a half times because you got distracted. Five full cycles.
Then check your jaw. Release it. Check your shoulders — they are almost certainly up around your ears. Let them drop. Notice the ground under your feet.
This takes four minutes. It costs nothing. It significantly changes what your horse feels when you put your hand on them.
Tacking Up as a Regulation Ritual, Not a Race
Most riders tack up in a controlled panic. They’re watching the time, fielding questions from their barn friend, half-listening to someone’s commentary about the dressage judge. Their hands are moving fast. Their horse is mirroring them.
Slow your hands down deliberately. This is a concrete instruction, not a vague suggestion. When you go to buckle the girth, do it one hole at a time and notice what you’re doing. When you bridle your horse, pause for a moment at the poll and breathe before you ask them to lower their head.
Your horse reads your autonomic state through your touch before they read anything else. A fast, tight, slightly-trembling hand tells them the world is dangerous. A slow, deliberate hand tells them you’re in charge. That is not metaphor — it is nervous-system-to-nervous-system communication, and it sets the tone for your entire warm-up.
The Warm-Up Ring Is Not Where You Fix Problems
Summer warm-up rings at busy events are genuinely chaotic. Riders going in every direction, horses that haven’t been out in a week, that one person cantering huge around the outside with zero regard for anyone. The noise level is high, the footing is churned up, and your test is getting closer.
This is not the place to address your horse’s new habit of popping the left shoulder. You don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth, and frankly neither does your horse.
What you warm up is connection, not correction.
Walk on a long rein for longer than feels comfortable — probably ten to fifteen minutes in this heat, both to let your horse look at things and to let your own body settle into the movement. When you pick up the trot, start with what your horse does easily. A forward, rhythmic rising trot on a large circle. Inside leg to outside rein. That’s the whole agenda.
If your horse is hot and looky, work on transitions within the gaits rather than dramatic upward and downward transitions that spike adrenaline. Trot to a more forward trot, back to a working trot. It keeps them thinking and gives you something useful to do with your aids without escalating.
The Thirty-Second Reset Before You Enter
This is the most overlooked moment in competitive riding. You have halted outside the ring, waiting for the bell. Your horse is pawing. Someone just had a disaster test and is coming off the court looking upset. The judge is writing something.
Here’s what you do: breathe out. All the way. Let your sit bones drop into the saddle like they’re heavy. Unclench your hands — really unclench them, fingers soft. Pick one focal point at the far end of the arena and look at it.
Then, when the bell goes, you are already riding. You are already in your body. You are not white-knuckling it to the first movement and hoping it clicks together.
This sounds simple. It is simple. Simple is not the same as easy, but it is absolutely trainable.
Heat Is a Variable, Not an Excuse
One thing worth naming plainly: heat degrades your decision-making and your reaction time. This is physiology, not weakness. At 90-plus degrees with full humidity, your brain is working harder just to regulate your core temperature. That leaves fewer resources for complex motor tasks.
So front-load your preparation. Eat something real before you get on. Drink more water than you think you need, starting the night before. If you have even a few minutes between dressage and stadium, get in the shade, get some water in you, and give yourself permission to sit still.
If you want to go deeper on the nervous-system piece — why some riders choke under pressure while others seem to thrive on exactly the same conditions — I did a full episode on this on The Elevated Equestrian podcast. The short version: your baseline regulation habits, the ones you build at home, are what show up under pressure. You cannot manufacture calm at the show if you haven’t practiced it anywhere.
What to Actually Practice Between Now and Your Next Show
- Breathwork before you mount. Not when you’re nervous. Every ride. It becomes a cue.
- Slow your hands during ordinary tacking up. Condition the habit when the stakes are low.
- Practice the thirty-second pre-entry reset at home. Literally halt before you enter your arena, do the routine, then begin.
- Debrief without catastrophizing. After every show, note one thing your regulation did and one thing your regulation did not do. That’s useful data. “I rode terribly” is not.
Your nervous system is trainable. So is your horse’s. And a calm, present, regulated rider is a better rider in every phase — not because they care less, but because they’ve learned to care in a way that keeps their body functional under pressure.
If you want to work on this in person — whether it’s warm-up strategy, nervous-system tools for the show ring, or just building the kind of partnership that holds up when everything is hot and loud — I work with riders privately and through clinics out of Aiken, SC. Head to /contact and let’s talk about what that looks like for you this season.
